Astronomers have discovered a supernova remnant that has cleaned up a large amount of surrounding material.
The remnant is called G352.7-0.1, or G352 for short, and the material it swept up is equal to almost 45 times the mass of the Sun, according to Zee News.
A supernova is an explosion that takes place at the end of the lives of many huge stars, and occurs twice a century on average in the Milky Way galaxy. This explosion is significant because the remnants of the destroyed star are sent into space, and as the field of debris expands, it carries with it materials that it encounters, Astronomy Magazine reported.
The shape of G352 is also an important finding since it is very different in radio data from that in X-rays. Most of the radio emission takes the form of an ellipse, while the x-ray emission fills in the center of the radio ellipse. The difference is displayed in a new composite image of the remnant that features X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue and radio data from the National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in pink.
A recent study states that hotter debris from the explosion, close to 30 million degrees Celsius, is more permanent in G352's X-ray emission than cooler, almost 2 million degrees, emission from surrounding material that was cleared by the expanding shock wave, Zee News reported.
The study is significant since the astronomers calculated that G352 exploded close to 2,200 years ago, and supernova remnants of this age often create X-rays that are taken over by swept up material. Scientists are still looking for a reason for why this takes place.
The astronomers also looked for a neutron star that may have been given birth from the supernova explosion, Astronomy Magazine reported. They did not discover any clues of such a star in G352, with one possible reason being that the neutron star is to faint to be detected, and another possibility being that, instead of the star, a black hole was created by the explosion.
Residing in the Milky Way Galaxy, G352 is located almost 24,000 light-years from Earth.
